June was a busy month and I was not able to do a re-cap of the OMG! flyball tournament that took place June 11 & 12th, so this post will be about that tournament and the FNF tournament which took place this past weekend. So, this post will be a little long!

We were so excited for the OMG June tournament! Our good friend Lori and her partner Pat were coming up from Wisconsin for a visit and to watch us play in the tournament. Raine was in line to earn her 60,000 point title, Nika was going to make her debut and we were coming off a great high after our teams did so well in Debert. For whatever reason, this was a tough weekend for Aviators. On Saturday the dogs seemed off, we were not hitting good times, Callie was bobbling at the box – which never happens and Brooke was having some issues holding her ball. At the end of the day we ended up a disappointing 3rd. One of our worst finishes in almost 2 years. Red Eye did better and ended up second in Open 1.

Saturday night we all chatted about what went wrong and we all decided that, you know what, there are going to be tournaments that just don’t go our way, because this is a dog sport and dogs will be dogs! Tomorrow was a new day! Nika was rocking her warm-ups and Raine was still in line to earn her 60,000, so Sunday was going to be a better day.

And you know what…it was! Aviators made it to the finals and we had to beat FAME and beat their best time against us to win first. We were able to beat their time in the first heat, but FAME brought it and they then set a new time to beat of 16.370. We ran a 16.397 in the same heat! Super close racing and we were not able to do it and came in 2nd. It is always fun to have two teams run their best time of day against each other in the last race of the day going for first place. We have no problem losing by .027 of a second. THAT is fun racing!

On Red Eye, Nika continued to rock her warm-ups and Raine did earn her 60,000 point title! Lori and Pat surprised us with a beautiful cake for this accomplishment. Raine is the senior dog on our team and the first dog to earn this title. At 9.5 years young, I hope she still has lots of racing left, but it was very special to have Lori there to see her earn this big one. Nika continued to be a rock star and Nitsa came up just shy of her FDCh-G title, only 5 points!

OMG! put on a great tournament and we had Christine run Kynkk with us on Red Eye, which is always fun!

Up next was the July long weekend tournament in Cornwall, PEI. We always love this tournament and we were extra excited because we knew there were going to be a lot of out of town teams, which is always fun! We were also hoping to rebound after a less than stellar Fredericton tournament.

FNF did a great job keeping the racing moving. There were 75 races on Saturday and 69 on Sunday. We loved the “engraved” solo cups for titles and the beverages and mussels are always a treat!

I used to think that close to home tournaments were better for the dogs. They slept in their own house, settled better, no travel, etc. I have thrown this theory out the window! I now believe that the dogs prefer away tournaments. They know once the truck is packed and we hit the road that they are going to race…and did they ever race this past weekend!

We wanted a rebound from Fredericton and we got it! Aviators did amazing this weekend. They took 1st on Saturday and 2nd on Sunday in Division 1. Nitsa, Callie, Brooke & Feist were pulling out great times, including a new PB of the season: 16.052 – with room! Nitsa was consistent 4.0’s, Callie was hitting 3.8’s and low 3.9’s, Brooke threw in some 4.0’s and Feist had lots of 3.7’s and 3.8’s! The finals each day were against MassChaos and they were very close races. On Saturday they pushed us to the limit and we ran a 16.131 last heat of the last race to get first. We thought we must have been super tight, but when we looked at the passes, we realized we actually had 9+ feet of passing! On Sunday, we were in the finals against them again, but they had us on time and they took first. It was great racing and we had no issue with second place. Nitsa also earned her FDCh-G title!

Red Eye had an up and down weekend, placing 6th on Saturday and improving to 5th on Sunday. There was still plenty to celebrate with Nika making her debut. She was amazing, super focused and earned her first three titles: FD, FDX and FDCh – way to go little girlie! Thank you to Amanda from OMG! and Wink for racing with us part time! We will now take a bit of a break for the summer. Our next tournament is not until the end of August in Florenceville. We have plenty to work over the next 8 weeks!